I'm searching for a "good enough" gprof output visualizer. Kprof seems unmaintained.
Profiling is an important part of (speed sensitive) applications development, but I fail to find support on the major Linux IDEs.
Any suggestions ?
+1
A:
I recommend using KCachegrind to vizualize the logs given by oprofile.
drhirsch
2009-10-16 08:51:31
It does appear, if you know what to look for, that KCachegrind can get line and instruction level inclusive costs. So they're getting there, and that's good.
Mike Dunlavey
2009-10-19 12:38:41
Oprofile does exactly the same if you disable the performance monitor registers, or on a arch which doesn't have some.
drhirsch
2009-10-18 23:47:55
@drhirsch: I just looked at the on-line doc for Oprofile. From what I could tell, yes it takes stack samples, but then it appears to fall into the usual trap. It won't let you see them (that I can tell)! Rather it 1) summarizes at the function (not statement) level, and 2) assumes the call-graph with measurement is what you need. The key point of taking stackshots is: don't summarize (summaries lose information). Instead, actually look at them. And, you don't need a lot if they are taken when it is being slow.
Mike Dunlavey
2009-10-19 12:21:08
... As an example: check out the comments on this link. The user took 4 samples and got a 7x speedup. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/890222/analyzing-code-for-efficiency/893272#893272
Mike Dunlavey
2009-10-19 12:34:33
No, it does sum up at the statement level. http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/examples/ (at the end) You can choose to get a output which is source intermixed with profile data. But I agree with you partly, manual stack sampling may be quicker sometimes and its guaranteed to be dirty always :-) If you have some really bogus code, you will likely find out where the problem is even with only a few samples. And I have to admit, I have used it sometimes. But if some finetuning is required, I would rather not recommend this.
drhirsch
2009-10-19 15:41:59
@drhirsch: I won't debate the "dirty" part (of which I'm not ashamed :-). Thanks for your input.
Mike Dunlavey
2009-10-19 18:44:27
A:
Probably not what you're looking for, but for me, gprof with an editor with decent search does the job. Are you looking for in what case the top X functions are called so you can optimise them or do you want a nice call-graph of your application?
stefaanv
2009-10-16 20:58:09